Curv Health has closed a $1.5 million round of equity financing, which will help the company sell its digital healthcare product directly to health and educational institutions.

With offices in Halifax and Toronto, Curv uses machine-learning tools to analyze video of people in motion, then uses that information to develop fitness routines to prevent or cure injuries.

In its first round of funding, the company received investment from a range of backers from around the world. They include such venture capital funds as: Toronto-based Globalive Capital (which also invested in Fredericton-based Eigen Innovations last fall); Chicago-based NewStack Ventures; Newfund Capital, based in Paris and Silicon Valley, and ACICS Ventures of Japan. Curv also received funding from angel investors in Spain and an Angel List syndicate.

“Measuring human motion has traditionally relied on human eyes or costly hardware,” said CEO and co-founder Shea Balish in a statement. “Our bet is that the future of measuring human motion is computer vision combined with machine learning, which is far more intuitive, scalable, cost-effective, and in some important respects, more accurate.”

Balish, who recently held a Banting Fellowship at the University of Toronto, started the company that would become Curv in 2017, while he was doing his PhD studies at Dalhousie University. Since then, he and his team have bootstrapped their growth by licensing their technology and through a series of awards and research grants.

One award was the National Football League’s 1st and Future Competition in 2018. It allowed sports-related startups to pitch solutions that could help the pro football league. Curv won the first prize of US$50,000 and two tickets to the Super Bowl in which the Philadelphia Eagles downed the New England Patriots.

The company’s Software-as-a-Service solution provides users with insights into musculoskeletal issues — that is, how muscles and skeletons work together.

“A lot of health insights can be extracted from how bodies look and move,” said Balish. “We’re building a new suite of standardized and accessible tests for the body, which we believe will replace crude measures like Body Mass Index and others.”

The company now has a six-member team and has an opening for a senior software developer or engineer. The staff at the Halifax office in Founders Square carry out such duties as software development, R&D and sales.

“In Phase 1, we developed our core technology via annual recurring API licenses with large enterprise,” said Balish in an email. “We raised this round to go after Phase 2, in which we deploy our SaaS platform that functions as the vehicle for our core technology, allowing providers to integrate our tools within their workflow.“

The company now has annual recurring revenues of about $500,000 and Balish said it hopes to strongly increase sales as it closes out 2019.

The funding round was led by Henri Deshays, a partner at Newfund Capital, who focuses on seed-stage companies in a range of sectors with exceptional founder-market fit.

“The Curv team has deep experience across the engineering, scientific and operational aspects of the problem they're solving,” he said. “They’ve demonstrated this by securing impressive revenue and partnerships early on.”